Social Work Now, Issue 35, pages 13-16.
Collaboration is a word frequently applied to describe the functioning of teams, and interdisciplinary work between teams and between agencies. It is not one that is applied to that fundamental of child protection social work practice, the co-working investigating relationship.
What do we understand by the term co-working? In the child protection context of Child, Youth and Family, it means a working relationship between two social workers. One is a key worker and the other a co-worker, both of whom are assigned a common task – to investigate and assess the safety of a child, and to identify whether anything needs to be done to improve that condition. Co-working brings together the strengths, experiences, capacities, energy and insights of two individuals. These are qualities that are mirrored in contemporary definitions of collaboration and suggest a process whereby different parties work with a situation to explore differences and find solutions that build on their own ideas of what is possible.
Without wanting to be too 1970s, we argue that co-working is about synergy, which ideally occurs when the sum of the parts or contributions of the people involved exceeds the total of their individual values.
The purpose of the co-working relationship is to ensure the child protection investigation has integrity. One of its intentions is to limit the potential for an individual social worker to collude with a client family and undermine safe practice.